From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Dec 10 2:49:35 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from curlew.cs.man.ac.uk (curlew.cs.man.ac.uk [130.88.13.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 04B1E1526D for ; Fri, 10 Dec 1999 02:48:48 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from Networks.Manager@rncm.ac.uk) Received: from fs3.rncm.ac.uk ([193.63.96.102] helo=rncm.ac.uk) by curlew.cs.man.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.92 #3) id 11wNbR-000KZI-00; Fri, 10 Dec 1999 10:48:45 +0000 Received: from RNCM-FS3/SpoolDir by rncm.ac.uk (Mercury 1.44); 10 Dec 99 10:49:03 GMT Received: from SpoolDir by RNCM-FS3 (Mercury 1.44); 10 Dec 99 10:48:40 GMT Received: from beowulf (193.63.96.96) by rncm.ac.uk (Mercury 1.44); 10 Dec 99 10:48:39 GMT From: "Peter McGarvey" To: "Jonathon McKitrick" , "questions" Subject: RE: FreeBSD vs Solaris Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 10:48:38 -0000 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) In-Reply-To: <385021F0.4409ADB8@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Importance: Normal Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > I just heard a lecture on Solaris. The guy was emphasizing > the scalability of Solaris, kernel threads, SMPT support, > and also referred to fixing many of the bugs in BSD. How > does FreeBSD today compare with Solaris? What advantages, > if any, does BSD have over Solaris? Thing is, there are two flavours of Solaris. On for SPARC and one for 80x86. Now, my experience of Solaris on a SPARC platform is best described as simply the best experience I've had with a computer. However, this was a dual UltraSPARC system with half a gig of memory so I suspect I fell in love with the hardware and not the operating system. Solaris x86 is different. I got the impression SUN made it to show people how cool Solaris was. And make a market for Solaris SPARC and SUN computers. In some respects it is better than FreeBSD - it installs fairly easily (except the bit where you carve up the HDD) and the out of the box config means the user never sees a text login - it's CDE all the way. Which is nice. However, Solaris has one or two annoyances. For a start you don't get a C compiler - you have to buy it or find and install GCC. You don't get perl either. Or gzip. And tar doesn't work properly (to un-tar a MySQL distribution I had to install Linux on a spare partition, un-tar the file in Linux, then mount the Linux partition from Solaris and copy the files accross). Oh yes, and the Solaris Boot manager is the most irritating thing ever. And another thing, Solaris x86 is slow. I've had it running on a PII@400 with 128MB RAM. My FreeBSD machine (a P166 with 64MB) ran faster. To sum up... Solaris on SPARC is as good as FreeBSD on Intel. On an Intel Solaris comes second. So if you can afford it get a decent Sun SPARC system. Failing that use FreeBSD. TTFN, FNORD -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Peter McGarvey, Networks Manager | email: Networks.Manager@rncm.ac.uk Royal Northern College of Music | tel: +44 (0)161 907 5218 124 Oxford Road, Manchester, | fax: +44 (0)161 273 7611 England M13 9RD | mobile: +44 (0)7887 990564 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message